The first daffodils of spring are up and starting to bloom on the property. I’m not sure who before us planted those, but they’ve come up every year since we moved in. This year it looks like some animal did some spreading of them. I would really love the property to come alive in the spring with flowers like this but I guess I need to plant them first…..or wait a really long time for them to spread, its been five years!

I planted something like 100+ fruit seeds (apple, pear, plum, apricot, peach, tart cherry, elderberry, oak, still need to get some sweet cherry) to be good rootstock for grafting on to, but also just to see what I come up with. I was planning on getting all kinds of scion wood and graft out multiple branches per tree and let some of that trees fruit show through as well. It will be good to get a nice variety around here and even if the fruit isn’t good eating for humans it will feed something! There are still a few seeds I need to get planted but I have a couple of the ones I planted coming up!

I’m guessing apple? I honestly have no clue, but its totally something I planted since there are several different places this is coming up and they are all right by the stakes I put down when I was planting so I wouldn’t mow over them. I’m super excited by this, as I managed to get myself out to plant them right after the first of the year when I was really struggling with depression, and now that is starting to pay off. You can see the pink flags in this photo I took after I planted, this is only part of the yard, I’d guess I planted on about 3 acres.

Some sandhill plum seedlings that I ordered from the Kansas Forest Service back in January got here about a week ago, but the weather hasn’t been nice enough for me to get out there and get them planted. I also got some native seeds from Vinland Valley Nursery about a month ago.

Its taken me so long to decide where to put them I had to put a few of the seeds I bought in the freezer since they needed cold stratified before planting and I didn’t manage to get them out there. Each package does 500 sq feet so it does cover quite a lot, but we have 15 acres so its not really that big of an area. I also got some milkweed and a couple other things that are natives. We live in a little green belt with cropland on both sides so basically all we get around here are the damn grasshoppers that get driven away by pesticide use on either side so come over here to eat us down to nothing. The chickens help but I KNOW that getting more beneficial insects and a bigger variety of plants and flowers around here will help even more. I miss my old gardens at the old house and I haven’t really done much yet to make that happen around here.

I’ve been struggling with agoraphobia, depression, and cPTSD really bad the last couple of years and this winter made it a whole lot worse even though I started therapy last November. I imagine that the only reason it didn’t get worse then it did is that I did start. I have transitioned into EMDR therapy now, which I had my first actual processing session Monday this week. I would definitely like to write about all of this at some point, but right now I’m just happy to even be feeling the urge to write at all. The first thing that depression stole from me was my creativity, but I’m doing the work to get it back.

-Fin